Posts Tagged ‘left-libertarianism’

Left-libertarians are dismayed at the support most libertarians and classical liberals have been giving to right-to-work laws, which withdraw recognition from clauses in collective bargaining contracts that require all employees in a workplace to pay agency fees to the union that represents that workplace. Many libertarians have supported right-to-work laws on the grounds that they “balance the playing field” somewhat or undo some of the harm caused by the National Labor Relations Act (or “Wagner Act”), which requires employers to bargain collectively with a union that achieves majority support in an organization election. But left-libertarians aren’t buying that as a rationale for laws that withdraw recognition from a particular type of private contract.

[T]he distortions in human life caused by intrusive laws always raise the temptation to patch over the problems with additional legislation. That additional legislation is likely to lead to more problems … That’s why we’re always better off dumping bad laws than trying to “fix” them in a spiraling game of spackle-the-law books.

Right-to-work proponents argue that the laws they favor only help to level the playing field created by government action—by reining in special privileges granted to unions under existing labor law.

But those laws actually presuppose the restrictions inherent in that framework, while extending them further. One goal of the NLRA and later federal laws was to reduce conflict—-and in effect reduce workers’ choices—-by ensuring that just one union, moderate enough to win majority support (and therefore moderate enough to be cooperative with employers), would operate in a given workplace, while suppressing more radical unions and labor actions.

“Two wrongs never make a right. The economic answer is to repeal the bad intervention and not try to counterbalance it with another bad intervention. Such moves only provide the politicians with greater power over the entire economy.” In other words, the end doesn’t justify the means.

Is the “two wrongs don’t make a right” analogy persuasive here? First, let’s specify that we are looking at right-to-work laws for private-sector workers. RTW laws for public-sector workers could be viewed simply as the government’s tying its hands with respect to its own future collective bargaining negotiations, something that few would deny they have a moral right to do. Second, let’s all agree that the purpose of collective bargaining is, above all, to establish a monopoly of labor with respect to a particular employer. The union uses its bargaining power to negotiate higher wages and benefits than they could receive on a competitive labor market. That this is the primary purpose of unions, especially in the post-Wagner Act era, isn’t disputed by mainstream labor economists (see Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action, among many others). Third, let’s agree as libertarians that the Wagner Act is unjust, that it wrongly forces employers to negotiate with a union and wrongly forces employees to be represented by a union even if they do not consent to such representation. Of course, non-libertarian liberals can and do disagree with this proposition.

Now, let’s consider an inflammatory analogy to the Wagner Act. Imagine that the government decides to give its official stamp of approval to Mafia protection contracts reached with shopkeepers (call it the “National Mob-Small Business Relations Act” (NMSBRA)). So long as the Mafia follows certain procedures in strongarming shop owners into agreeing to their demands, the courts will enforce contracts reached under duress. To libertarians, left and right, there is not much fundamentally morally different between the Wagner Act and the NMSBRA.

Now, suppose some of these mob protection contracts contain exclusive-supplier clauses. They state that the hapless storeowner not only must pay off the mob, but must use only mob-approved suppliers. In response, some states pass “right-to-supply” laws, which forbid the enforcement of mob protection contracts’ exclusive-supplier clauses, while leaving the basic structure of the NMSBRA intact.

Do right-to-supply laws take away freedom? After all, they interfere with “private contracts,” and it is possible, though unlikely, that some shopkeepers would want to sign exclusive-supplier contracts with the Mafia even in the absence of any threat of coercion.(*)

But surely, refusing to enforce a particular, exploitative provision of an extorted “contract” does not in any tangible sense infringe on freedom and, in fact, enhances it. By the logic of left-libertarian opponents of right-to-work, if the government ever adopted something like the NMSBRA, then “right-to-supply” laws ameliorating the oppression should be resisted as intrusions into supposed “freedom of contract.” This position reminds me of purist opponents of legal medical marijuana on the grounds that only fully legal marijuana is worth supporting.

Now, I don’t want to imply that mob protection contracts are in fact morally equivalent to union shop contracts. I am merely arguing that they are analogous. Sometimes an “extreme” analogy can help us better understand the moral principles behind our judgments. In this case, I see no intuitively appealing moral principle that could equally condemn right-to-work laws and the Wagner Act, as left-libertarians wish.

Kevin Carson was good enough to drop by and comment on my posts about his book, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (here and here). I copy the comments below with my responses:

(Kevin) Thanks again, Jason. In general, I don’t think any paradigms are falsifiable; you can add epicycles to anything. And I think a revived LTV contributes analytical insights that are obscured by vanilla-flavored marginalism (like the normal relationship between cost and price for reproducible goods, and the intersection of the Tuckerite theory of artificial property rents with the Ricardian theory of rents as a subtraction from wages).

I see the subjective mechanism for the LTV not so much as moral as — believe it or not — praxeological.

In my last look at left-libertarian economics, I argued that Kevin Carson’s resurrection of the Labor Theory of Value adds no new information to standard, neoclassical price theory. Carson wishes to disapprove morally of profits but does not show that capitalists add nothing to the value of production. In particular, Carson acknowledges that capitalists contribute “time preference,” providing saved or borrowed funds to production in exchange for higher consumption at a later date. Carson relabels this investment as a kind of labor.

In this installment in the series, I examine Carson’s argument in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy that “really existing capitalism” depends crucially on exploitation and coercion, and that if coercion were to abolished and markets truly freed, “capitalism” would disappear. Carson’s argument that free markets abolish economic profit is not altogether without support in standard economic theory. In introductory microeconomics classes, the model of “perfect competition” is taught. Under perfect competition, firms in each industry sell an identical product, and entry is costless. Therefore, if firms charge more than the cost of production, including the interest rate on investment, new entrants would undercut their price. The equilibrium price therefore yields zero “economic profit.” “Accounting profit” will be all that remains, representing the natural interest rate on investment, which in turn is determined by the opportunity costs of investment (forgone consumption).

Carson does seem to be relying on the perfect competition model to make the case that economic profit will not exist in a free market (116-7). But of course, really existing markets do not conform to the perfect competition model. Why not? Standard microeconomic theory points to product differentiation, imperfect information, and costs of entry as frictions that generate market power and, accordingly, economic profit. For Carson, however, the explanation of economic profit lies in coercion, the exploitation of workers and enrichment of capitalists by the state:

Without state intervention in the marketplace, the natural wage of labor would be its product. It is statism that is at the root of all the exploitative features of capitalism. Capitalism, indeed, only exists to the extent that the principles of free exchange are violated. “Free market capitalism” is an oxymoron. (129)

In this post, I continue my series on left-libertarian economics by examining Kevin Carson’s arguments for the labor theory of value (LTV) in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. I argue that this is one area in which left-libertarian economics does represent a degenerative research program, that is, a body of scientific theories that protects itself from refutation by redefining itself in such a way as to render itself nonfalsifiable. The problem is not that the LTV as Carson formulates it is false, but that it is simply a relabeling of the Marshallian synthesis with scientifically irrelevant normative claims added on.

Carson begins his book with a discussion of classical political economists’ understanding of the LTV. He persuasively demonstrates that the LTV of the classical political economists was not as naive as the later marginalists made it out to be. Both Ricardo and Marx recognized that demand played a role in determining prices, and that labor effort could not cause a good to become valuable. The classical political economists held a “correlational” LTV, that is, that in most markets the price of a good would correlate strongly with the amount of labor used to make it – and the “amount” of labor had to be understood as its opportunity cost. Expending labor on making a mud pie would not make it valuable, because no one would be willing to pay for it. Alfred Marshall synthesized the marginalist-utility and labor theories of value by modeling the way in which the interaction of supply (determined by cost of production) and demand (marginal utility) determines prices. In the short run, Marshall argued, (more…)

“Left-libertarianism” can be defined in one of at least three ways. It can refer to “liberaltarianism,” a tactical stance and set of policy positions combining a substantially libertarian thrust with a preference for making alliances with the modern center-left. It can refer to a revisionist philosophical movement that differs from Robert Nozick’s entitlement theory of property rights in a more or less egalitarian direction, without going all the way to a Rawlsian social-ownership theory (Michael Otsuka, Peter Vallentyne, Philippe van Parijs, etc.). Finally, it can refer to anarcho-socialism, the original “libertarianism.” In what will probably be a fitfully updated series of posts, I am going to investigate the last of these, insofar as it has attempted to create a new school of positive economics.

I am going to focus, at least initially, on Kevin Carson’s Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, which seems to be one of the most influential recent works in this area. Carson’s theories have, for instance, had some influence on Auburn philosopher Roderick Long and a number of other libertarian public intellectuals such as Sheldon Richman, Gary Chartier, and others associated with the “agorist” and “voluntaryist” movements and with organizations such as the Center for a Stateless Society. And of course, influence has gone back the other way as well. Many left-libertarians, such as Fred Foldvary, have also been influenced by late 19th century economist Henry George, but I will not be focusing on their theories, which are relatively close to the neoclassical mainstream, compared to Carson’s mutualism.

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